Multi-channel audio in the field of consumer electronics has been available for movies, music and games for almost two decades, and it is still increasing its popularity.
Multi-channel audio recordings have been conventionally encoded using a discrete bit stream for every channel. However, although representing multi-channel audio by discretely encoding each channel produces high quality, the amount of data that must be stored and transmitted increases as a multiple of the channels.
Some audio encoding algorithms segment a down-mix of the multi-channel audio signal into time-frequency blocks and estimate a single set of spatial audio cues for each time-frequency block. These cues are then used in the decoder to assign the time-frequency information of the down-mix to separate decoded channels.